This trip was one of the hardest things I have ever experienced emotionally and to an extent, I feel a little overwhelmed blogging about it now. But it is important to explore the world through the lens of our own perception, both good and bad. This is how stories are passed on, how lessons are solidified, by the retelling through a myriad of different eyes. What one person may write, about the history, facts and figures of the holocaust might speak to a certain reader and pass the message of history along. Equally, some might read a poem and feel the deep abiding horror of what happened at Auschwitz in the depth of their stomach just as I did. All perspectives are valid, and needful, to perpetuate those lessons.
Putting a face to the name. That title speaks to something I think is at the root cause of why the human species can perpetuate such levels of genocide. How people who consider themselves compassionate can turn aside and look the other way when such extreme violence is being visited upon a whole group of people. If it is made easy for them to not put a face to the name it's possible for them to follow a twisted logic of dehumanizing people. I also think the psychology of fear has a lot to do with why the Nazi's got away with such atrocities along with the rhetoric of hate based on race, religion and stereotypes. It is a hard circumstance to analyse and I am aware that many non-Jewish people did resist and help/hide people persecuted by the Nazis, helping them to escape the holocaust.
The wall of pictures in Auschwitz had a profound effect on me psychologically. I shrugged it off at the time, but if you look closely in the picture above you can see that Aurelia Bienko is smiling. Is this a case of a learned reaction? Smile for the camera, so to speak. Or did she still have hope and belief that this wasn't a death camp that she had been brought to at the time the picture was taken. It was a strange thing to think about, but these are the questions I wanted to ask her and possibly an emotional defence mechanism for me as I walked down that hallway. Her smile was the thing that jumped out at me among the many faces on that wall because it seemed so out of place among those others so full of hopelessness and suffering. Faces of fathers bereft of family and mothers separated from their children. Or maybe hers was a smile of defiance. We will never know.
I put a name to that face in a sea of faces because something that seemed out of place caught my attention. Don't get me wrong, each and every one of those pictures hit me hard, their names, the senseless nature of their deaths, the description of their jobs and family, all made it personal. I was seeing people some of whom I undoubtedly would have got along with, some maybe had disagreements with, and perhaps our personalities would have clashed, but all people just trying to get on with life. My emotional reaction and fixation on Aurelia was simply a way to cope with the realization that over a million people, just like you or me, were exterminated over a twisted ideology.
Below, is a library of pictures of the main Auschwitz concentration camp before we move on to Birkenau. I have written a poem at the end of this post which expresses my impressions much more clearly than I find myself able to in prose.
The language used - 'special treatment' - still makes me feel sick to my stomach.
Birkenau - Poetry - An Oven Should Bake Only Bread
Mind flayed by the cattle stalls,
muscles tight, tears held in stasis,
empty chambers now collapsed.
Cold shelves lined walls,
where women were stacked.
Paint-flecked carved pain
engraved in family names.
I ate a Twix surreptitiously,
while starving eyes of the dead
counted sun-baked tourists.
All ovens should bake only bread.
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Wow Rowan.. this is so powerful In so many ways.. I’ve seen quite a few posts about this trip and yours is the first to actually stop me in my tracks. You capture the soul of humanity here in a heartbreaking but important way. Your words and pictures work together to make a huge impact in only a way you could do. Thanks for sharing this. ❤️
Thanks for this awesome feedback Justine. It was such a hard place to visit but so important to make that difficult journey. I feel like the poem and thoughts I express here are a truth that has been expressed before, about re-telling and never forgetting the lessons of this atrocity. But I was trying to tell it in my own way, speak my truth about how it made me feel but also the wider lesson of this history. This is all only my own opinion, but I see the same attitudes of 'turn the other cheek' still perpetuated all around the world, all be it in much less extreme circumstances.
Hopefully, it is just a case of another few hundred years of evolution of thought, of retelling these stories and histories until the human race changes fundamentally to stop visiting violence on ourselves and the planet on which we live.
Ha ha, maybe I'm just a massive hippie and I'm good with that... but the type of hippie to get up and do/say something where I see the opportunity to make a difference.
I couldn't take photos inside the Auschwitz Camp... Just too hard for me... I couldn't imagine (or rather I don't want to imagine) what happened back then... It totally hit me (hard) when I see the baby and toddler and kid clothes and shoes... How could they? HOW? And the hair... The long hair... Just a thumb left or right... That's it... Work or die... Even though @arcange did explain to me in the bus on our way back... But I still can't justify this... Even until now...
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There is no justification Eliza. None at all. I guess arcange was maybe trying to explain the psychology behind how people can dehumanise others? But I'm just guessing.
I understand how you feel Eliza, I was silent, on my own most of the time as I couldn't cope with speaking to others. I felt sick to my stomach... this was because my brain is set up to be extremely visual so I was constantly seeing images behind my eyes of the various things described. The way I work through such hard things is to write about them. Poetry or fiction, usually decompresses these images that have built up in my mind during a difficult experience like that excursion to Auschwitz.
To be honest, I was not trying to explain anything other than my own condition after this visit.
I went back to the bus, shocked, muted ... wondering how such atrocities were possible, with an organization and an industrialization pushed to its paroxysm.
It took me halfway to be able to talk again. And it's thanks to the kindness and benevolence of @elizacheng that I was able to reconnect to the group step by step. Still today, I have a hard time rethinking this experience without feeling overwhelmed by emotions.
Thank you for being there too! ❤️❤️❤️
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It sounds like you had very similar experience to me arcange. And I guess everyone had the same feeling of devastation to an extent. I was also pretty quiet and withdrawn on the bus home, but had a kind and friendly steemian in @jayna to chat things through with :-)
Ah... @jayna is lovely too... ❤️
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I didn't dare to think... Visualizing it would be worst than a nightmare... Writing it down in words or poetry may not be what I am good at... 😅 But talking to people makes me feel better. Or maybe just hugs is much greater.
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Hugs are always good here is a virtual hug from a thousand miles away 🤗
Dude that poem... you take me down an emotional street and then.. the Twix. I'm not sure i remember a poem has made me just sit there and think in the way that just did. Eating a Twix at Aushwitz. As bizarre as that is, it's one of the most thought-provoking images that has entered my brain in recent times.
Bloody well done with that one sir.
Thanks Mark. Yes, it is a bit of a literary device in the way it creates 'gut punch' impact but it is honestly also just the truth of the physical action I was taking while walking around Birkenau.
But, having said all that I was aware when I was writing the poem toward the end that it needed something to drive home the level of fundimental inhuman, alien atrocity that Aushwitz is, and the memory of my breakfast Twix came flooding back. The normalness of the Twix just helps to elivate the deeply tragic images in the previous lines. This poem is the first piece of writing in a long time that had me welling up while I was writing it and when reading it back again now. I may perform it at a poetry night here in Liverpool.
Thanks for the feedback. It means a lot
incredible post brother, the faces on the wall was what got me too. I can see why you are in a daze writing for 3 hours, I am guessing this took even longer, I know from editing my video I was lost in the emotions I was too numb to really feel while I was there...A lot of what I felt while sitting and going back through my photos and spending time thinking about trying to make some sort of order of my photos to the chaos that took place had a strong impact for me for sure. Its something we will never forget having visited this place and I am glad to have shared this with so many of my fellow steemians and now you. Great job!
Yeah, you're so right about the emotional impact and the picture hallway hits hard as it brings it home that these were, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers... and in fact they could/should be considered our family. This shit could happen again if we're not careful as a species and start to recognize when we are being manipulated by extremist ideology. It's an insanely complicated issue and I guess I'm simplifying things somewhat, but I strongly believe that this global culture of separation through national (tribal) identity is something we're long overdue evolving beyond. Ha ha, but enough of that political stuff.
I wrote 2 more verses to that poem (the first was written a few days ago) but the new verses just weren't good enough. The intensity had gone from the poem compared to the verse I wrote the other day and I was pretty numb after writing the opening part of this post.
I shall go and check out your video Vlad. I agree that the sharing of these 'challenging' experiences is a key part of healing the collective unconscious from such extremes of inhuman humanity.
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This is powerful.
I recently visit Dachau, the camp on which the rest of them were modeled. The feeling of pain and suffering still lingers in the air. I can't imagine how anyone could go and not feel the atrocities.
One line in your poem struck me in particular:
The adjective surreptitiously says so much here. I watched folks at Dachau smiling and taking selfies, posing for their social media accounts and felt that was incredibly disrespectful. This one line, and that word in particular, does a great job of summarizing the feeling of simply being alive and living in the midst of place where so many were not as fortunate.
Yeah, I've seen videos of that stuff as well and I am really proud to say, that out of large group from a conference of bloggers/vloggers, I saw no steeemians exhibiting that type of behavior. I'm really glad I didn't, because I would n'y have been able to stop myself pulling them up over it in quite a forthright way.
Thanks for the compliment on the poem, I felt like that line was the strongest part of the poem, and the thing that elevated it to be something a bit different.
As you express so well, I thought that the adjective 'surreptitiously' was completely apt. It's how I felt snacking while I was at Birkenau, kind of guilty, but I was super hungry as I'd missed breakfast lol.
Anyway, it was a powerful experience and in some ways not a negative one as I feel I learned a lot and it inspired some decent creative work which tells a story, an important story to keep telling.
Thanks for the support and meaningful feedback @mattifer
I've read about these groups of steemians in a few different blog posts. How did you connect with a whole group of steemians all going to the same place? I'm glad that our group was respectful of their surroundings. :-)
And I felt the same way at Dachau. It wasn't a negative experience. I came away slightly different than I arrived, and I have a deeper understanding of why we can't let hate and authority blind us. It's important to stand up before it's too late.
I can't say I did connect with everyone in the 100 or more large group. We were split into 4 or 5 septate groups of around 20 but I was deeply inside my mind the whole time. But we kept walking past the other groups and I saw that everyone was acting in accordance with the tour rules. Lots of pictures being taken, some were chatting but everyone was respectful and none of that 'selfie cheesy grin' Instagram style shenanigans.
Sure, I get that. It changes your outlook somewhat. Awakens you to the importance of embracing compassion as an active mode of behaviour.
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I didn't mean connect on a personal level... I meant how did you find that large of a group of steemians to go do something with in the first place? So far, I've not met a single steemian in person, other than the one who turned me on to steemit in the first place.
Hi @mattifer
I was just re-reading some old posts and I saw I hadn't answered your question .... So long ago now.
This trip to auschwitz was one of the excursions at steemfest 3 in Krakow, which I was very lucky to attend 🙂
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This is such a powerful post, and beautifully done. Fabulous poem, thanks for sharing. Have always wanted to visit myself, but knew it would be such a hard and emotional thing to do, just looking at those pictures is truly heartbreaking, well done you for being able to do this.
You write so wonderfully ❤
Thanks you for the compliment on my poem and I completely understand where you're coming from in your comment above. There were many people at steemfest 3 I spoke to said they couldn't go on that trip because they knew they wouldn't be able to cope... and I understand why.
Very difficult but I could just about cope emotionally so I thought it was a worthwhile trip to make. Thanks for the support and meaningful feedback @letsgetquirky
I can feel their pain and suffering.. Your photos and words are so powerful.
Thanks for reading @melinda010100. It is not an easy subject and by no means an easy post to read... or write for that matter. I think, an important subject to address though.
I appreciate your support :)
A Jewish historian by the name of David Cole made a documentary about Auschwitz in 1992. It is available on you tube www.youtube.com/watch?=aObOdLOK708
Cheers a428. I shall check that out :)
This is a really insightful and beautifully written post, @raj808. And it has certainly launched some interesting conversation. I am sure we will be processing what we saw at Auschwitz and Birkenau for a very long time. It’s so difficult to get our minds around what happened, and to actually imagine real people, in real life, making the choices they did.
I also took a picture of Aurelia, among the countless portraits on that wall. I was captivated by her beautiful, wry smile. I wanted to talk with her, tell her she did not die in vain, and that we remember her, and her sisters — all the women pictured on that wall, and millions more, all these years later, and that much of the world has more or less righted itself. I think of that smile on her face as saying, “you can take my life, but you cannot own my soul.” Rest in peace, Aurelia.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, and your poem, Rowan. May we continue to learn from the past, and may the world one day be completely free of terrorism, dictatorships, oppression, war and famine. It may be too much to ask for. But I believe it’s always worth remembering to hope.
A beautifully tragic, but very possibly right, observation. Now I look back at the picture there seems a great amount of defiance in that smile. Such a hard trip and this was a hard post to write. I actually wanted to write so much more but couldn't keep writing past a certain point. That's why there is only a little edit and a few extra lines added to the poem that I originally wrote on a comment on your post.
I completely agree. I expect this to be something I am still processing and learning from for years to come.
Thanks for being my bus-buddy both before and after the trip to auschwitz @jayna
Your recounting of the visit is remarkable and outlines the heavy, incredible horror of this place and what happened there. Thank you for sharing the experience with the rest of us.
No worries @thekittygirl.
Thank you for reading. This isn't the easiest post to read over but I am glad that so many people gained an impression of what auschwitz was like by reading it. For the reasons stated in the article about telling and re-telling this story. I feel like it is important... even though it is definitely difficult.